Human
by M-Sama
Summary: (figgin genre catigories, none of them fit...) One girl discovers Neo's truth


(Otay, one shot story idea)

Some seemed to think the very idea appalling. She didn't understand why. She never understood. She was strange that way. 

The One was more like a religious figure now, more idol then man, according to Momma. Especially as people like Grandpa, who had known the One, got older and older, their memories of him fading into the grandeur that was becoming his legend.

She wanted to learn more about him. All the shining stories of the brilliant hero who had given his life to make peace with the machines and left the world forever…When she was small she had gobbled them up as eagerly as any star-struck child would. Except the luster of the stories seemed to fade in her eyes as she got older. The selfless martyr, taken to another world, heroic and brave to the last…there were even those who claimed they had seen him in their dreams, that he would come back someday at the end of everything…

Momma would scoff. She said it was only a matter of time before some white-bearded man smeared ashes on himself and began teaching the Gospel of the One. Momma had never seen the One herself, she had been freed right after the end of the war, but she had been skeptical of the story from the beginning. 

But her child, Andromeda, used to sit and listen to the older people talking. She had been such a quiet child…never once crying, not speaking until she was past three years old…Her father had known the One, had the most glowing of opinions of him, spoke endlessly when asked of how he had been saved by his faith when all hope seemed lost… Andromeda would sit in a corner, look out on the world, and listen to the old people talk. 

When she was six she first heard Morpheus, the man who had found the One and freed him; the man who was becoming more and more of a legend himself as time went on. He had been among the first to notice the small quiet child who sat with her arms around her legs, staring into space with eyes that seemed to catch and hold the world in their green depths. He had been the first to actually speak to her: the simple girl who the old people watched while her parents worked. No one had told him she had something _wrong_ with her. He bent over and did something few people had done.

"Hello." He said. 

Those glassy green eyes looked up into the fiery depths of the old veteran's. They seemed to fill of what they saw there: a basin so bright filling with life. 

"Hello," she said. "I'm Andromeda. You are Morpheus. I heard the women talking about you." It was the most words the old people in the room had heard her utter. They looked at each other in amazement. Maybe she didn't have anything wrong. Maybe she was just a late bloomer after all and everything would be normal for her…

She didn't seem to care about the hub-ub behind her back: the autistic child miraculously cured. She hadn't been autistic, Morpheus knew. She had been thinking.

She was always thinking. Always. One could see it in those eyes: she was far from unresponsive. She took in everything. 

Shortly before his death she finally asked Morpheus about Neo. She was a young woman then, yet she seemed above age. Her eyes hadn't changed, and while she could make some small talk, clothe herself, feed herself, and lived in a room of her own she still seemed a thing ethereal. And one look told him she wasn't interested in grandeur and destiny. She wanted to know about the man. 

And he told her. His voice, a ghost of it's former resonant self but still deep and rich, called up a continuing scroll of pictures, times long gone, a war long over, strife long settled yet summoned as by a medium to hang in the air of this room where that girl sat and listened. Trinity: the woman who had unlocked his heart and who had been the last of the crew to believe him, her sometimes ruthlessness in the face of death. This was not the shining ideal mate, glorified as the best and worthiest woman of all time. Cypher: driven mad by sheer longing for normalcy, sick of war, sick at heart, not demon, merely human driven too far. Fleeing from the agents, Death Incarnate, those swift terrible creatures who were now mere signposts, guarding the places humans could not go. Smith, the Evil One with the strangely human madness in his eyes who had declared his hatred for all that was his inescapable reality. Hardlines, always so far away, and those pod-born Morpheus had freed. And Neo. Most of all Neo. 

At last the voice slowed and stopped, the memories vanishing into nothing, with his life-partner sending Andromeda home so he could rest. 

Andromeda did go home. Her eyes saw nothing about her. 

When she got there she sat and looked at the blank metallic wall for a long, long time. Finally she stood, took a nail from a nearby table, and etched this message. 

_Human_. 

Neo's destiny was his own, but his strength was that of the human race. His own doubts and fears were something he had to contend with every moment of his life, and he still managed to do what he did. His love for Trinity, her love for him, perfectly flawed in the fallen nature of man and woman, was not of heaven but of earth. And she, who had found such wonder in life and such dullness in the lustrous fairy tales of childhood, loved them now and forever with all her heart for their humanity. 

Andromeda spoke of what she had discovered to those who would listen, which were few. No one liked to think of the heavenly heroes as humans with weaknesses and flaws. 

Humans die, but myth and legend never do. 


End file.
